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Gmail Hits 425 Million Users

Sites include Google.com. Published on July 16th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

The Google I/O developer conference is starting to look like a muscle flexing exercise as the search giant has made announcement after announcement about how well its products are doing.

Gmail, which the company launched back in 2004, now has over 425 million users and unlike many other platforms which claim big numbers, Google’s 425 million look like active people. But Gmail’s success is beyond the home user; today the web based email platform is popular with government agencies, businesses and universities.

According to Google, the Gmail platform is used by over 45 different state agencies and 66 of the top US universities rely on it to handle their communication. But it’s the embrace of Gmail by businesses which proves the strength and reliability of the company. For most businesses a loss of communication can be costly in a literal sense, so the news that over 5 million businesses now use Gmail to handle their communication is proof that Gmail is now the standard bearer for email.

Much of Gmail’s growth has come in the last couple of years and so the trajectory points to it breaking the 500 million user mark certainly by the end of 2012. When that does happen, Gmail will be undisputed king of free web mail and the over-take of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail will be complete.